Recently, I was reading the first chapter of a friend's current work-in-progress, in order to give her notes on it.

So, let me say that first off, I did like her story.  She is a good storyteller.

But something about the chapter nagged at me, because the descriptions felt flat.  On the one hand, it was clear to me that she has a sure vision of her characters and setting.  And the chapter was not lacking in the details.  But on the other hand, something just wasn't working.

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One of the things about creating a totally new fantasy world is that you don't want it to sound too much like "this world".  And I certainly didn't want to sound like I was copying Tolkien bit for bit.

Today, I was going along, working on some new text in The Ring of Adonel, moving the story forward, and I had a character say "I will go tell the lords."

And I stopped.

Because, the reality was that he was doing more than just talking to those the common folk would consider "lordly".  He was going to talk to the leaders of the three Fynlaren Houses.  One of which now is actually a woman.  And suddenly, I realized that I wanted a term that was not quite as laden with gender baggage as "lord".

So, I wanted a term that would refer to these specific characters as the principal figures of their "tribes".  And I didn't want it to be a really obvious borrowing from real world cultures.

After running through the thesaurus looking for possibilities, I decided to start mining Old Irish.  I'd studied it in graduate school, and have a grammar book, that glosses a lot of the vocabulary.  So I drew up a list of English words that had meanings that could be applied to the position under consideration: head, crown, leader, first, lord, one, master, rule, sight, voice, king.  As I grazed through the book, other possibilities of meaning suggested themselves: high, great, very great, highest, treasure, gift, I judge, holds fast, hero, forehead.  In the end, I went with one of the words for "high", ard, and a term for "prince", mal.  Combining them, I get ardmal (sing., with ardmalen for plural -- the "-en" ending for plurals has already been established).

Of course, after coming up with the term, I then had to go back through the manuscript as it stands and replace the terms.  Except that not every instance of "lord" is being replaced, because it is still used as a generic honorific.  And then, also, there's the decisions about when to capitalize it and when not to. 

I believe it's these little touches that are important to creating the sense of place, the sense of existence, of a fantasy world.  Especially for dealing with things that we don't have. 

It's also one of those things that I felt satisfied with. Probably a detail others won't be interested in, but there it is: today's achievement in my work.  :D